Amazon Web Service suffers network failure in Korea

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an hour-long network failure in South Korea during the early mornings of Thursday, which halted the services of major local online shopping malls and cryptocurrency exchanges.

The webpage and mobile app of South Korea's largest e-commerce firm Coupang could not be accessed from 8:50 am to around 9:50 am.

The homepages of Market Kurly, a fresh food delivery service, POOQ, an online media service company, and hotel booking service Yanolja, were also shut down during the same time period.

Cryptocurrency exchanges Coinone and Upbit were also affected by the AWS network failure.

There was a domain name server issue within AWS, Upbit said, but services have since gone back online.

AWS reportedly underwent an emergency inspection of the problems that arose in its network within Asia, and found that the problems also affected South Korea.

The cloud company said it was looking into the matter and apologized for the inconvenience caused.

AWS is widely used by South Korean firms due to its price-competitive services. The country's largest conglomerates, Samsung and Hyundai, use AWS services for their overseas operations, and more local firms have also started using the cloud vendor's services for local operations purposes.

Earlier this month, Korea Air announced that it was moving all of its data from data centres to the cloud that AWS and LG CNS will provide.

Amazon also announced that it will update its Auto Scaling with machine learning which will help customers avoid over provisioning and reduce EC2 costs.